pine for pine

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Facebook Acapella

Paul's Benguet Joke

I like Paul's timing. I was reporting in my international class about Foucault and the health system when my phone beeped. Not once but thrice. I briefed my Ilocano friends that I would be going to Laos so I knew no one would text. I was so confident I upped the volume of my text. So it beeped and then there were a few giggles from the class. He he he. Three jokes from Paul. Curiously, Paul and I were previously called the harbingers of death by my friends because we send them only death notices. This plays on the vegetable farmers' obsession of Elf trucks.

Ten of The Most Unreliable Airlines You Do Not Want To Fly With

Unkeeping the Faith

Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed

Richard Jones

Wan Chu, my adoring husband,has returned from another tripselling trinkets in the provinces.He pulls off his lavender shirtAs I lay naked in our bed,waiting for him. He tells meI am the only woman he’ll ever love.He may wander from one side of Chinato the other, but his heartwill always stay with me.His face glows in the lamplightwith the sincerity of a boywhen I lower the satin sheetto let him see my breasts.Outside, it begins to rainon the cherry treeshe planted with our son,and when he enters me with a sigh,the storm begins in earnest,shaking our little house.Afterwards, I stroke his backuntil he falls asleep.I’d love to stay awake at nightlistening to the rain,but I should sleep, too,Tomorrow Wan Chu will bea hundred miles awayand I will be awake all nightin the arms of Wang Chen,the tailor from Ming Pao,the tiny village down river.

Blue

I'm attending a short course here in Vientiane and sometimes to ease the boredom I type poems from the books I brought here. Here's one:

Another Word For Blue

John Engman

On better days, I bathe with Wallace Stevens: dreaming his good dreams before I fall asleep, waves lapping, none of the poorly choreographed crashing they do around here, but waves can read music.

And one afternoon, when I felt a new dream studying me closely, I kept my eyes shut and lay flat, but the dream flew off, leaving me alone again, asleep with reruns.

People who don’t understand what it means to be an artist should be punished, and I know how: make them be one.

Make them write about their own mortal souls in the third person, make them enroll at college, where they would be forced to write creative things about a piece of driftwood, forced to write poems about their moods using colors like “cerulean,” another word for blue.

People don’t understand real artists: bottles with messages wash up on the beach, always a heartbeat ahead of the sea.

It isn’t always a matter of being in the right place in the right time, wearing clothing that makes them notice you: black satin jackets and green string ties and crocodile shoes.

Sometimes it’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, unsinkable as Ivory Soap, an aesthetic theory that isn’t much more than a plain bad attitude.

All I ever wanted was an ice-cold beer and a booth with a view of the local scene, that, and the adulation of multitudes.

There’s a little place about a block from here where they never heard of free verse.

When they say they took a bath, they don’t mean they spent an hour soaking with Esthetique du Mal, they mean they lost big bucks at the track.

For all they care, Esthetique du Mal could be bath salts.

They know two things: on planet earth “being yourself” doesn’t mean much, And there’s no paycheck in pretending to be something else.

So when I tell the waitress, oh yeah, I could have been another Wallace Stevens – she tells me, oh yeah, so who needs two?

That’s the kind of stuff that goes on the poetry business.

Am I am pleased when I can refrain from expressing myself, refrain from saying anything new: I like saying the same old thing, words that stay put.

Words that don’t go far, letting life remain a mystery for you.

Words that I might say to a small group of friends someday, friends who will sponge me down whenever I begin raving about free verse back in the twentieth century, quoting at length from my own modest book of poems, a visionary book which sold poorly.

Carver Talks to FRANK

Every story I’ve written, with maybe one or two exceptions, has had a starting point in the real world. Stories don’t come out of thin air. At least the type of stories I’m interested in. I don’t like to read about writing fiction and so forth. I have very little patience with that. I don’t have much time with this earth and I don’t want to to waste any of it. Usually the first line in a story or poem remains the same, everything else is subject to change. I saw a man once, sitting enxt to me on a plant and just when we were flying into the city, he took the wedding ring off his finger. And this little thing stuck in my head. The story “Fat” in Will You Be Quiet, Please? is about a waitress waiting on a fat man, a story told by me by my first wife many years ago when she was a waitress. She came home from work one night and said, “I waited on this strange character tonight who spoke of himself in the plural. He called himself “we.” “We would like some bread and butter”; “We would like some water”; “We would like some beef tournedos.” And I thought how unusual it was for a man to speak of himself that way. But I didn’t do anything with that story for years and then it came to write the story and it was the question of how best to tell it, whose story it was. Then I made the conscious decision how to present the story. And I decided to tell it from the point of view of the woman, the waitress, and frame the story as if she were telling it to her girlfriend. She can’t quite make sense of the story herself, all the feelings that she experienced, but she goes ahead and tell it anyway.

I Know What You Did on June 10

The School Uniforms in Kanming, China

Their school decided to add ad placements in the uniforms for favors. Maybe the uniforms are then given free. If Kanming can do it, why not Kamuning you say? No wonder in China, they call unsolicited ads as urban psoriasis.

Call Me Pathetic but I Recognize Them All

The Devil is using Olympics volleyball to lure young men into group masturbation

The call is, get thee behind me Satan

Behind the locked doors of America’s Christian bedrooms, young boys are getting swept up in a disturbing trend. “I had a frantic mother come to me the other day in tears,” said Pastor Deacon Fred. “She told me that her son, Timothy, invited several of his friends over into his bedroom for private prayer and devotional scripture studies. What she told me next is enough to send shivers down the spine of every God fearing mother and father in our Christian Nation! Satan is in our midst, my friends! The Devil is using Olympics volleyball to lure young men into shedding their clothes, flopping around and falling off off their beds with him into the pit of iniquity. Lucifer is turning innocent afternoon gatherings of imprecatory prayer into frenzied young Masturbating Baptist Boys’ Clubs!” Ay, moreAlso funny are the anti-McCain ads on the right. Melanophobiacs for McCain!

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Travels

GOOD Magazine came out with a great multimedia map of the more famous journeys including Magellan's disastrous foray to the Philippines. Also included are the Electric Koo-Aid Trip of Ken Kesey and the On The Road travel of Kerouac.

Grounds for Coffee

Mao V used to joke about the coffee grounds in Starbucks, saying that they are being brought by people who would re-brew them again. I don't really laugh as hard with that joke because it could be true. But people I know who bring them home said that they use it as fertilizer. It's supposed to be alkaline so it offsets the acidity of the ground, especially in Baguio. One told me he uses it to deter his cats from defecating in his plants. It turned out to be true. Yes, there are 11 ways where coffee grounds are important. Using it to shine your hair and your cat's fur are two reasons. Getting rid of ants is another.

James Tailleur

In search for a measly ballpen, I walked two kilometers around my hotel. Tourist row. Mostly French cafe and Internet shops at 100 kip a minute (Yes, they do kipling here) Also I saw two shops using the word "tailleur." I watch a lot of FTV (Fashion TV. Yes, they have it in my cable but it's FTV India which is like saying Bollywood in a straight line and no flailing of hands. Meaning no nudity and fun) and so I think I never saw that word before. Tailleur? Helleur? They also have a true blue French bakery selling baguettes for 13000 kips. The approximate ratio is one dollar for 10000 kips. And then there is the Laotian French bread which is dabbed in margarine and sprinkled with lotsa sugar similar to the Baguio Market. I saw other Frenchified words here which I will list after buying that ballpen.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Guitar Guns-For-Hire

Hey, it's your birthday and you have money to incinerate. No E-Heads or Taken by Cars for you. You want the Brit pop or whatever. Not The Lettermen or the other washouts. You want Gnarls Barkley. OK, here's the price:

Fish Crackers

Atienza and Tatad Use Withdrawal Method. As Usual.

Environment Secretary Lito Atienza and former Sen. Kit Tatad, both opponents of the Reproductive Health Bill which is set to be deliberated in Congress, withdrew from their scheduled debate at ANC tonight. Atienza and Tatad are instead going to be replaced by newspaper columnist Joe Sison and Paranaque Rep. Eduardo Zialcita. They will be pitted against either Rep. Edcel Lagman, former Health Secretary Alfredo Romualdez or economist Dr. Philip Mendalla. The anti-RH group also wanted no winners or losers declared and also called for text voting for best speaker. The debate is on Square Off hosted by Twink Macaraig from 8 to 9 pm.

Update: Dr. Quasi Romualdez and Mendalla pounded the holier-than-thousand Dr. Quasi won the best speaker in the texting division, provingonce again that the withdrawal team still has much to swallow

Domci, Dompi, Bubut and the Gang

Oz: The Map

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Holy Patience and Internet

From Harper's: A community of Welsh Cistercian monks who hadbeen relying on a dial-up Internet connection opted to geta broadband connection. "Patience is one of thecharacteristics of monastic life," said Father Daniel vanSantvoort, "but even the patience of the Brothers wastested by our slow Internet."

This reminds me of what Dr. Joey T sent me a month ago about his i-Tipid card which is really tipid or thrifty in baud rate. At 2.4 kbps, it's a test of patience talaga.

The Atlas of Fiction

There's a new site called The Atlas of Fiction which lists using Googlemaps the locales of great fictions. I am asking you to contact the site to add fiction written in the Philippines because it remains uncharted as of now.

The Original Hip

Poetry Magazine blog said: I know that a primary root of hip-hop is Jamaican toasters delivering rhymes and declamations over portable sound systems in the 1960s, and that a version of this was introduced to the Bronx by the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, an early pioneer of hip-hop. I also realize that the Last Poets are important figures in the genre’s birth. More generally, hip-hop is part of the African-diaspora derived “signifyin’” practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so famously wrote about. This is all very true. But I’d like to make the case that ________ is one of the original hip-hop poets.You'd be surprised

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Old-School Pirate

Saturday, August 16, 2008

The Only Creative Advice You Need to Know This Weekend

The Catholic Fight Club

Who said this: “It’s so Catholic – everything I write is so Catholic! It’s always about someone martyring themselves for the greater good of another group, or another individual … about who can sacrifice and kill themselves in the greatest way.”

Weeping At The Wheel: Crushingly Sad Songs

npr brings us crushingly sad songs

Locusts

Artist: The Frames

Album: Burn the Maps

The Frames' Glen Hansard has a way of ripping out the listener's heart and massaging it tenderly before returning it in better condition than he found it. In "Locusts," he contemplates the emotional wreckage around him and ultimately opts to flee -- hey, just like you're doing! "I'm moving off / I'm packing up," he sings, adding, "I'm willing to be wrong." Fortunately, in Hansard's music, glimmers of redemption and contentment pop up in the grimmest of moments: "The bells that ring in hope are swinging from the ropes / we thought we'd one day perish on." That's the spirit!

Astronaut

Artist: David Mead

Album: Wherever You Are

A criminally under-appreciated singer-songwriter, David Mead is at his best when he's ruminating wistfully on places he's had to abandon or pass by altogether. Mead followed his 2004 sleeper masterpiece Indiana -- which uses the titular state as a metaphor for the space between home and where we find ourselves -- with the similarly winsome yearning of an EP called Wherever You Are. In "Astronaut," Mead laments leaving a city he loves, but adds a bit of motivation for his departure: "Then you tell me a lie and say you'll miss me when I'm gone." It's a painful roundabout admission that, while the places we leave exert a gravitational pull, they can never miss us the way we miss them.

Casimir Pulaski Day

Artist: Sufjan Stevens

Album: Illinois

Here's hoping that the specifics of "Casimir Pulaski Day" don't apply to your own tearful drive: In all likelihood, you're not a young man who falls in love at Bible Study and questions his faith after watching the object of his unconsummated love die of bone cancer. If you are? Wow, sorry to hear that. But either way, it isn't necessary to fully relate to Sufjan Stevens' ornate ballad: It just sounds like sadness, what with its solemn trumpet and its cooing mourners and, well, the fact that, in the song, someone dies of bone cancer. If you're sad, "Casimir Pulaski Day" isn't going to cheer you up; let's leave it at that.

Our Hell

Artist: Emily Haines

Album: Knives Don't Have Your Back

The five stages of grief end with acceptance, right? In "Our Hell," Metric's Emily Haines reflects on a relationship and declares, however unconvincingly, that "our hell is a good life." It's a wrenchingly hollow victory -- taking comfort in the fact that an awful existence is worth striving for -- but as you drift along some dusty highway, "Our Hell" at least helps you count your blessings. And, of course, it'll remind you of their insignificance, in the process helping you overthrow the tyranny of hope. "I tried to save you," Haines sings, "but it can't be done."

Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

Artist: Stars

Album: Set Yourself on Fire

A bittersweet narrative unfolds in Stars' "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead," during which former lovers experience an awkward and accidental reunion before applying revisionist history to their difficult past. She's philosophical about their relationship, while he obscures his feelings beneath bogus bravado, but their ambivalence and sadness coalesce around one breathtaking line near the end: "Live through this / and you won't look back." No matter how bad it gets, at least "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" helps you take a measure of solace in the fact that memories fade.

All He Wants for You to Do is Open the Door

Amy Winehouse's Newest Video

Friday, August 15, 2008

French Rain

It’s Raining

It’s raining women’s voices as if they (were dead)(had died) even in (the) memory(And) it’s (also)raining you (as well )marvellous encounters of my life O (droplets) (little drops)(And these)(Those) rearing clouds (start neighing a world of aurical towns)(begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities)Listen if (it's raining) (it rains) while regret and disdain weep to an ancient musicListen to the (falling lines)(bonds fall off) which (bind)(hold) you above and below

by Ron Padgettby Roger Shattuck

Guillame Apollinaire wrote this a hundred years ago. A rain of words. A rain of memories of women. Now we have Cueshe feeling the same things but saying it in obvious, pathetic lyrics. And the people croon over them. What has been sung had been said in better form a hundred years ago.